| Following the 1898 Spanish-American War, the National Geographic Society banked on Americans' new interest in the world, shedding its form as a congenial association of like-minded scientists and emerging as a conduit of exploration, adventure, exoticism and natural history for the average American citizen. This dissertation interrogates National Geographic as America's ubiquitous source of wholesome exotica and erotica, examining the ways in which the magazine framed the world for its millions of readers, and questioning its participation in the cultural work of U.S. global hegemony. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt's articulation of "strategies of innocence" in European bourgeois travel narratives, I suggest that National Geographic engaged in multiple strategies of innocence, and argue that it is in the context of American imperialism, and in the popular representation of the world in which the U.S. became a global power, that the concept of innocence is particularly appropriate.;By "National Geographic's world," I mean (1) an emerging American hegemony in the world system in which the National Geographic Society participated, (2) the world as represented by the magazine to its readers, and (3) the institutional world of employment at National Geographic. The first chapter discusses United States politics, economic interests, social debates and foreign policy, and their expression in the magazine's editorial policy and practices. The second chapter examines pertinent theories and tropes of representation, and discusses the art and science traditions in photography, National Geographic's predominant mode of representation. Using invaluable source material, much of it heretofore unexamined by scholars, the last two chapters analyze the lives and work of two regular National Geographic contributors, Maynard Owen Williams and Harriet Chalmers Adams, in relationship to National Geographic's politics, its techniques of representations, and to time- and place-bound articulations of gender, race, and class. |
